Jerusalem’s Compelling Presence

If you’re praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, you cannot see the Dome of the Rock, one of the holy places of Islam, which is right next door and rises above the wall as if it’s spying on the worshipers below. Its gorgeous golden dome is obliterated by the high rise of the wall.

Similarly, if you’re praying at the Dome of the Rock, it is easy to miss the fact that just one archeological level down is the ancient wall holy to Judaism. You’d have to leave the mosque, climb up a wall and peer down to see everybody gathered there, dwarfed by the gigantic wall.

Jerusalem is like that: a place where arch enemies live cheek by jowl and manage to ignore each other’s presence, even as they lead parallel lives.

If you’ve ever lived in the Holy City, the conversations last week at Camp David made you feel slightly schizo: the Israelis and Palestinians arguing over who has a right to Jerusalem as a capital and whether or not to divide the city. You want to shake Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and get them to admit to the world what they both know: Jerusalem is already a divided city.

There is East Jerusalem, almost all Palestinian except for the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, and West Jerusalem, almost entirely Jewish. In East Jerusalem, the buses are blue and run by Palestinians. In West Jerusalem, the buses are red and run by Egged, a state organization. There is no real public transit between the two sides. In East Jerusalem--tacitly if unhappily accepted by the Israelis--sits Orient House, the stately Husseini family palazzo where the Palestinian Authority and other Palestinian officials meet. It’s their unofficial capitol building.

East Jerusalem lives by the Islamic religious calendar, West Jerusalem by the Jewish laws. This means that in West Jerusalem, Friday night and Saturday are sanctified; in East Jerusalem, Friday afternoons are especially holy. In West Jerusalem, almost everything is closed on Saturdays, but if you go to East Jerusalem, everything is open. The two sides of Jerusalem are not just different cities: They’re different countries with different cultures.

Over the years, the Israeli government has had a changing view of Jerusalem. In 1948, a Zionist leadership more interested in establishing a Jewish state than in preserving Jerusalem as some kind of homogenous holy zone conceded the east and the Old City to the Jordanians. They did this, even though Zion really means nothing more than “Jerusalem”: Zionists are, literally, Jews who wish to return to Jerusalem. But ever since Israel took the Old City and East Jerusalem from the Jordanians in 1967--in the Arab catastrophe that was the Six-Day War--a “united” Jerusalem as the “eternal” capital of Israel has been the watchword of Israeli leadership.

As Yossi Beilin, an architect of the peace process and now justice minister in the Barak government says, “Even Jerusalem is not one word. It is a book, and in a book are many chapters.”

Beilin knows about the shifting status of Jerusalem. In 1995, he and Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), one of Arafat’s closest advisors, agreed on a final-status plan for Jerusalem, as well as other issues on the table at Camp David. Beilin says he and Abu Mazen “hugged and kissed in a very emotional non-signing ceremony” back then. They agreed that the Palestinians would set up their capital in Abu Dis, a suburb of East Jerusalem not within the actual city, and that the Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem would have broad autonomy, while Israel remained sovereign. Both sides agreed the case was not closed, and the issue of Palestinian sovereignty could be raised in future talks. This was crucial to the understanding.

Beilin wanted to press forward with the agreement and make it formal, but the Labor government of Shimon Peres hesitated and then lost an election to Benjamin Netanyahu, whose ascension meant a screeching brake was put on all talks and accords with the Palestinians.

It seems obvious now that Arafat is no longer in a position with his own constituency to redo the 1995 accords and give up East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. Abu Dis is probably unacceptable because Palestinian opinion has hardened as the long years have passed with little discernible progress in the peace process, and Arafat no longer has the political standing to override that opinion. In addition, as he has pointed out, Arafat cannot sign an agreement that gives a Jewish state sovereignty over al-Quds, the Arabic name for Jerusalem meaning “The Holy.” He does not represent all Islam, and Muslims around the world feel a special connection to Jerusalem not unlike the Jewish attachment.

It is precisely those attachments that are at issue today. Jerusalem’s significance for both Arabs and Jews is not just religious and not just political and not just psychological: It’s all these things.

A famous photograph taken at the end of the 1967 war shows three fabled Israeli officers--Uzi Narkiss, Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin--striding proudly through the Lion’s Gate after wresting the Old City from Jordanian rule. It’s a picture that lives in every Israeli’s mind: Israel asserting its military and political hegemony over all Jerusalem and establishing Jewish sovereignty over the pillaged and destroyed Jewish Quarter, as well as over the Western Wall, which is located in the heart of the Old City.

Barak, whose mentor was Rabin, must feel poignantly what it would mean to Israelis to grant authority over East Jerusalem and the Old City to the Arabs. For him, that’s likely to be an impossibility.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any leadership of any Middle Eastern sect that--once gaining control of the Old City--would willingly hand it over to another. It’s never happened in history: You have the Old City, you keep the Old City. The Jews did; the Christians did; the Muslims did; the Crusaders did; the Ottomans did; the Jordanians did; and the Jews did again. It can only be won by siege.

For the Israelis, control of the Old City is proof of their power in the region. It contains their holiest places, not just the Wall but the Temple Mount and, within the mount, supposedly, the elusive Holiest of Holies.

Unfortunately, the Dome of the Rock stands on top of the Temple Mount. The Old City is that kind of place, where history and geography cause endless complications and battles: It’s a microcosm of the Middle East. Eventually, only dual sovereignty, as in Rome, or international control will make sense there.

As for the rest of East Jerusalem, it’s hard to know what is the advantage to the Israelis in continuing their nominal sovereignty over what is already the symbolic capital of the new Palestine.

One argument put forward concerns security. It is true that in the past, Palestinian terrorists have often entered Israel through the open quasi-borders between the city’s two sides. In almost every terrorist bombing in Jerusalem, and often elsewhere in Israel, there has been a link with people who are East Jerusalem residents, because it is easier to pass men and materiel between East and West Jerusalem than between the West Bank and Jerusalem or any other part of Israel, where there are checkpoints manned by Israeli soldiers.

But is a security argument valid? One might equally assert that a divided city is better protection against such terror than a united one. In a divided Jerusalem, walls could be erected, checkpoints put in place, and armed convoys could patrol the periphery. This would be terribly sad; but it was the situation in the old days, before 1967, when Jordan ruled the other side. The only real security argument is that Israeli police are now free to track down and arrest people in East Jerusalem, which they cannot do in areas under Palestinian control. Yet, East Jerusalem becomes a locus of terror during politically charged times precisely because of this ease of mutual traffic: terror in one direction, security in the other.

Of course, the real solution to the problem of Jerusalem, and indeed all the other issues being raised at Camp David, is a solid and enduring peace that both the Israeli people and the Palestinian people can respect, or at least live with. One reason the process has taken so long is simply because that kind of peace is a hard thing to come up with.

Witness the state now being created by the process: a tiny patchwork made out of dusty, worn remnants of the Palestinian patrimony, splashes of Palestinian population strewn in no particular pattern over a wide counterpane called Israel.

Will this state satisfy the Palestinians’ longing for a homeland that is, in some significant way, their true homeland? Will it meet their need for some at least slightly meaningful restitution for all they lost in 1948, and again in 1967?

Arafat, who has done many brave things, and many things that are not so brave, must be careful what he signs at Camp David. Even if it should have Jerusalem as its capital, the new Palestinian state will not resolve the conflict if the Palestinian Authority, with one flourish of the chairman’s pen, says: This is the final end to our quest.

If Barak returns to Israel with a signed agreement in his hand, he will have to submit it, one way or another, to the approval of his constituents. Is Arafat willing to do the same? *